Python fans' holy grail

'It's only a flesh wound' . . . A scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The fat guy with the pheasant on his shoulder went next. He was painted red from head to toe. The pheasant was dead.

The director asked his name.

"Adam Bloody Knife Daggers in Your Face Forever."

And what role was he trying out for?

"Any role with bloody death in it," he said.

Outside the small audition room, there was a guy in a G-string with some bananas. Another man was dressed as a horse.

The open call for the new Monty Python biopic went pretty much as expected in New York at the weekend. A few hundred would-be cast members stood in line in the rain on 42nd Street. The actors were outnumbered by the freaks.

"We've had colonels, pepper pots, lumberjacks, silly walkers, men in lingerie and a very nice midget in full armour," says the director, David Eric Brenner. "One man came as Jesus. When I told him there's no role for Jesus, he said: 'That's all right; I forgive you, my son.' "

Brenner, 31, was sitting in the audition room casting his new film, Gin and Tonic, based on the life of Graham Chapman, the Monty Python star who died of cancer in 1989. Making the film, for which production is scheduled to begin in December, has been a lifelong dream for him.

"I've been a Monty Python fan/geek since I was 12 years old," he says. "I saw The Holy Grail and for the rest of my life I've been reciting lines non-stop, like, 'It's only a flesh wound.' "

Two years ago, Brenner reached out to a man named Jim Yoakum, who oversees Chapman's archives. Yoakum told him he had an unpublished memoir by Chapman. The film, based partly on this memoir, is named for Chapman's favorite drink.

There was an open casting call in California, where "the loonies lined up down Hollywood Boulevard", Brenner said. There were plenty on Saturday in Times Square, too.

One man, Paul Smithyman, 35, stood in line with an orange rubber traffic cone and claimed to be its manager.

"His name is Aristophanes; he's a method actor," Smithyman explained. "He was in that Dustin Hoffman biopic, if you recall it. I also manage a Coke can. Now, he gets a lot of work."

Smithyman's friend, Lee Wilson, planned to audition by appearing very British - which he is.

"I'm just going to go in there and stand and be British," Wilson, 36, said. "Don't you think my stance is British? Can't you see the British look on my face?"

Brenner said he would almost certainly cast British actors for the six major roles.

Nonetheless, most of those auditioning were Americans, if not New Yorkers. There was a student from Long Island pretending he was mute and a tax assessor from West Virginia with huge breasts of papier-mache.

Among these oddities, Mike Ford looked abnormally normal. He was dressed in a T-shirt and plaid trousers.